1. Since the launch of the LinkedIn Selling System 2.0 a fewmonths ago was strictly limited to 1,000 new owners, in fairnessto them, I’m only opening it up this time to 500 new people.

2. Out of fairness to all of my NeverColdCall.com customers,I’ll give those who don’t own the LinkedIn Selling System 2.0 achance to be one of those 500 new owners – but that email willgo out on Tuesday, February 3 – if you sign up for the earlynotification list, and get access on Monday, before everyoneelse, you’ll have a much better shot at being one of the first500 to get the System:

If you’re wondering what the “LinkedIn Selling System 2.0″ is,think of it as the original LinkedIn Selling System from lastyear on a massive dose of steroids… and to put the sheer powerof the System into perspective, last week’s LinkedIn Webinarsthat brought in so much praise and positive feedback is like the“Cliff’s Notes” version of the System!

PS: When you sign up on that page, you’re also going to get acouple of goodies too! First, a PDF quick-start guide toskyrocket your success with LinkedIn, and second, an amazingreport my research assistant prepared, full of astonishingfacts, figures, and statistics PROVING that LinkedIn is THE bestsource of hot leads in the world – bar none! You can get it allhere, and get on the early notification list while you’re at it:

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas has taughtover 80,000 salespeople how to generate endless qualified leads,with no cold calling. He’s won numerous accolades, such asReaders Choice for Business Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ,and has been named one of Fast Company’s top 30 most influentialpeople online.

“I attended this webinar this morning and I fully agree with that first sentence; this webinar was GREAT indeed! I wasn’t at first so sure if I should register. I thought I already know linkedin pretty well, but I was curious to see how Frank will fill up two full hours just talking about linkedin. So I joined and I’m SO HAPPY I DID! It really did take two full hours and was full of new ideas and information that I didn’t know. I already started implementing the ideas This webinar is not to be missed! PS: I don’t know Frank personally and he didn’t ask me to say this.”– Mirel Moskovits via LinkedIn

Not to mention the emails that poured in after all thanking me for supercharging their LinkedIn sales power!

LinkedIn is the #1 business networking venue in the world. 90% of all wealthy individuals are on LinkedIn, according to Forbes. That means YOUR VERY BEST PROSPECTS ARE THERE… so what are you waiting for?

How Can I Help You with LinkedIn?

How can I help you with LinkedIn?

Ever since I released the LinkedIn Selling System 2.0 back in September, I’ve been putting together a lot more LinkedIn training.

The main difference is that unlike the LinkedIn Selling System 1.0 and 2.0, which teach a massive amount of very effective lead-generation and sales techniques, the new material I’ve been working on is very systematic by contrast, even including spreadsheets and other organizational tools we use to automate and track LinkedIn lead-generation right here in our own office, as well as track activity and follow-up with each individual LinkedIn contact.

As I was putting the finishing touches on this week’s LinkedIn webinar, I realized it’s about time I put together all the work I’ve quietly been doing and make it available to you.

I’m thinking of releasing it sometime next month, but before I do, I have to ask you a couple of questions. Can you help us out?

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas has taught over 80,000 salespeople how to generate endless qualified leads, with no cold calling. He's won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast Company’s top 30 most influential people online.

WEBINAR: Get HOT Leads and FAST Sales with LinkedIn!

Ever since the LinkedIn Selling System 2.0 was released in October and broke new all-time sales records here at NeverColdCall.com, people have been asking, "When are you doing the webinar again?"

So, with that in mind, I'll be delivering the latest update of my most popular and best-selling webinar ever, How To Get Hot Leads With LinkedIn, this coming Wednesday January 21, at 10:30 AM, 4:00 PM, and again at 9:00 PM Eastern time.

This will be a LIVE webinar and nothing will be sold. You’ll get two hours of content that’s JAM-PACKED with powerful techniques you can begin using, immediately, to start using LinkedIn to fill your pipeline with hot, qualified leads.

LinkedIn is the premier business social media site, and thousands of deals take place there every day. And it’s rich with hot leads – and EASY to find and connect with them! LinkedIn alone could provide you with all the leads you need, and more, eliminating cold calling forever.

Learn how on this webinar! LinkedIn has always been my most popular webinar topic ever, and you won’t want to miss this one:

– Why LinkedIn is becoming the world’s best lead source– How 99% of salespeople aren’t using LinkedIn correctly– Step-by-step processes to generate hot leads & more sales– How to build the ULTIMATE business network on LinkedIn– How to use LinkedIn to establish yourself as THE authority in your industry– Important changes since I last presented on LinkedIn– … and much more!

Can’t Make Either Session?

No problem! I’m going to record the webinar as it happens, and you’ll receive a recording the following day. So register anyway to be sure you don’t miss out on this powerful, hard-hitting content.

And if you can make either time, you’ll also receive the replay, so you can continually refer back to the material as needed in the future.

Facebook: Your Questions Answered (?)

The Facebook webinars yesterday were a HUGE hit - during and after the webinars I had tons of awesome feedback and “Thank You’s” coming into my chat box!

We had great Q&A sessions (and in fact I’m still answering questions via email, that I couldn’t get to live on the webinar), and one of the common ones was from participants asking if they could get more in-depth training on generating leads and sales with Facebook.

I have already begun work on a Facebook training, but before I go any further on it, what would you like to see in it?

What questions do you have about Facebook?

What, specifically, do YOU want to learn about generating sales with Facebook?

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas has taught over 80,000 salespeople how to generate endless qualified leads, with no cold calling. He's won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast Company’s top 30 most influential people online.

PS: You'll want to see the video on the page - if nothing else, it will open your mind to the vast, endless possibilities that LinkedIn gives you when it comes to generating the hottest leads you can get, on full autopilot:

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the Never Cold Call Again® System and has won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast Company’s top 30 most influential people online. To learn more, and to download a free 37-page PDF preview of his Never Cold Call Again lead-generation system, visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com/

The LinkedIn Selling System has been his most popular and highly praised course and the all-new 2.0 version teaches the latest sales techniques and hidden marketing capabilities most LinkedIn users are totally unaware of.

Why Self-Hosted Email Servers Beat ESPs

One thing in my email experimentation and quest to find the best email marketing solution has been clear:

Hosting your own email server beats ESPs - every time.

Even Mandrill, which I've raved about in previous posts, has fallen behind in seed-list deliverability tests.

Why?

Simple: When you use an ESP, your dedicated email IP address is sitting on a Class-C IP block with - you guessed it - over 200 mass mailers!

Self-hosting, on the other hand, puts you in much better - and more reputable - company. Especially if you're using a premium hosting company like Rackspace as I am.

When I went to Cisco SenderBase to check reputation on my mail IPs, I dropped the IP selector to /16 to see who I'm sharing my IP block with. It looks like I'm in pretty good company. Some examples include:

- Edible Arrangements- Kellogg's- Fiverr- NeilMed

Like me, all of these organizations have good mail reputations. With my Mandrill or Sendgrid IPs on the other hand, the results aren't so good. I'm sitting on an IP block full of mass mailers, many - or most - of whom are sending out spammy content to lists of questionable quality, and as a result they're getting the rest of us penalized.

The best example of this is Sendgrid. When I started using them in March, 2011, I saw an immediate bump in open rates and sales numbers, despite the high cost. Gradually that declined, and a recent series of seed-list tests shows them going to Hotmail/Outlook junk 100% of the time and getting blocked completely by AOL. When confronted, they tried to blame my content, despite the fact that this was not happening with my own IPs, or even with other ESPs.

Mandrill is another good example. Initially I saw almost impossibly good inbox rates with them, but they're sadly down below 70% now.

Why? Very simply because they've grown in popularity, they've added large numbers of new customers, and the end result is lots of spammy content coming out of their servers and their IP blocks. Sure, they can police their customers and suspend users who are spamming, but in the end, they have to make money which means looking the other way to a certain degree in order to keep enough billing customers on the books.

If you're intimidated by the prospect of maintaining your own mail server, don't be. I sent through my default localhost mail on my server for a long time (after adding SPF and DKIM validation of course) and then spent a few hundred bucks on a custom Postfix setup that consistenly out-performs the ESPs. And it's free - no monthly or per-email charges!

For larger senders, Postfix is still an option, and I've seen good results from GreenArrow Engine, and PowerMTA, although GreenArrow's support and customer service is infinitely better than that from Port25 Solutions, PowerMTA's parent company.

Sendgrid vs. Mandrill vs. GreenArrow vs. Postfix

UPDATE May 5th: GreenArrow contacted me after seeing this post, reviewed my installation, and found a mis-configuration that appears to have been responsible for the poor deliverabily to Yahoo inboxes. A new test achieved Yahoo deliverability. In fairness to them and also to determine which solution I'll ultimately keep, I'm going to continue mailing via GreenArrow side-by-side vs. PowerMTA to determine who the winner is.

11+ years into owning and operating NeverColdCall.com and one thing has become abundantly clear: Email is the very lifeblood of my business! Even a slight lift in email deliverability equates to tens of thousands of dollars per month in added income directly into my pocket, so keeping a close eye on my email performance and diligently working to continually increase it is something I do personally, that probably takes up more of my time than anything else in my business - including writing the daily email copy that goes out to my subscribers - and that I'm not willing to outsource to anyone who is not highly trusted and/or strongly recommended from a trusted colleague.

And as my list grows, now to well over 250,000 subscribers, getting emails delivered continues to get more challenging as well as more profitable. The economies of scale are at work here. A 1% improvement means 2,500 more people reading a promo email, which will easily add several thousand dollars to just one business day.

Up until 2009, when my list was still well under the 100,000 mark, my setup was simple: I sent mail directly from my web server via Exim. It was very slow, but 30,000 emails/hour isn't bad when your list is that small, and performance was superb: 100% deliverability according to ReturnPath. Of course, there is probably no such thing as 100% deliverability, and all stats are relative, but that's still a damn nice number to see. (I still have that screenshot saved somewhere!)

When I moved to Texas in 2009 and gave up the endless partying-and-drinking-and-eating glutteonus lifestyle that I lived during my first six years of NeverColdCall.com, three in Scottsdale, Arizona and three living in Newport Beach, California, two things happened: I began paying more attention to my business and gave up the "four hour workweek", I mysteriously lost about 25 pounds without really trying, and my email list grew and grew and grew. So did my profits - and with it, my ability to invest in email infrastructure.

(Since moving to Dallas in 2012, that 25 pounds is starting to reappear so back to the gym I go.)

Hence my hodgepodge of email services and servers.

In 2009 a friend who owns a web hosting company in San Antonio offered me some spare office space in his building that I happily accepted. I not only had unimaginably fast Internet speed sitting in a datacenter but also had access to the company's PowerMTA mail server.

That was the upside. The downside is that the person who managed it, who no longer works there, did a lousy job and spent more time at the office working on his own MLM nonsense than keeping emails going.

After one particularly infuriating incident when I was on vacation and learned that none of my email had gone out for several days, I did a Google search, called SendGrid, set up an account, and started sending with them immediately.

The upside was an immediate and noticeable increase in open rates and sales volume. The downside was the cost - with a list as large as mine and near-daily email broadcasts, I was on their $1,200/month program, and at that cost is absolutely, positively makes sense to own your own infrastructure. Heck, that's $14,000 a year, which is the cost of a PowerMTA Enterprise license, the kind that SendGrid themselves use. And you only have to buy it once!

Needless to say, I explored other possibilities. A referral to a mail expert resulted in a custom Postfix setup that cost me $400 to have built and was able to load-balance/rotate up to 8 dedicated IP addresses. Rackspace happily sold me the IPs and off I went.

I used that for the next couple of years with solid results. Zero cost to me other than the $20/year to be on the Barracuda whitelist and great results.

Then I decided to try SendGrid again. And Mandrill. It was damn near impossible to gauge results, and the ESP route was getting expensive again, so I decided to finally buy PowerMTA. When a Google search brought up GreenArrow Engine MTA which advertises as a lower-cost alternative to PowerMTA but is equally good.

I gave them a try on a 2-month trial, which is still happening even though I stopped sending through GreenArrow due to dismal results.

But with the GreenArrow trial came a month of free GreenArrow Monitor, a seed list email monitoring system similar to ReturnPath's monitor. The seed list is about 550 emails strong which means accurate results, versus just one Yahoo inbox, one Gmail inbox, and so on.

The results were pleasantly surprising and disappointing at the same time - pleasantly surprising because my free Postfix server performed best, at least in terms of my lists's composition, with Mandrill taking second place, while GreenArrow, the most promising but fairly expensive of the bunch, performed poorly, as did SendGrid. (Again, this is all dependent on my list's composition - GreenArrow may be great for your list if it's low on Yahoo subscribers.)

First of all, my list composition - because NeverColdCall.com includes a huge percentage of professionals and business owners, Gmail dominates my list composition - here it is:

Gmail: 37%Yahoo: 21%Hotmail: 18%AOL: 4%Other: 20%

For the purposes of this article, we'll just look at the first four - results were fairly comparable across all MTAs and ESPs for the "other" category since my emails tend to get delivered very well to corporate email servers regardless of who I use to send them.

SendGrid:

Mandrill:

GreenArrow Engine:

Postfix:

Not surprising to any email marketer, the big challenge is getting delivered to Yahoo, which is notoriously difficult. And most surprisingly to me, Postfix is the one that got the job done. GreenArrow and Mandrill failed nearly 100% with SendGrid hitting about 50% spam on Yahoo.

Interestingly, all four achieved 100% inbox on Gmail, obliterating the myth that Gmail is especially difficult when it comes to getting to the inbox.

These results also show that infrastructure isn't necessarily as important as management - both SendGrid and Mandrill use PowerMTA but the results are dramatically different. I think this has a lot to do with Mandrill/MailChimp's very strict requirement for low bounce rates and spam complaints. SendGrid is a bit more liberal, and when your dedicated mail IP is on the same Class-C block as email marketers with poor reputations, you're bound to get penalized as the entire Class-C is greylisted, so props to Mandrill/MailChimp for their high sender requirements, despite users' whining about being suspended by them.

The Verdict

For me, it's a toss-up between Mandrill and Postfix. Postfix is not reaching Hotmail - 18% of my list - while Mandrill is missing 9 out of 10 Yahoo users, which, ironically, is about 18% of my list. What matters most for me is getting into the Gmail inbox, which I'm doing on any and all platforms, perhaps due to the age and reputation of my hostname vs. the individual IPs, MTAs, and ESPs.

Since Mandrill is pay-to-play and could suspend me at any time for a mailing such as an affiliate promo that might produce a high percentage of spam complaints and/or bounces, Postfix it is - for now.

The real verdict is that I've bought PowerMTA and it's being installed as I write this. As Andrew Dice Clay famously said, "If you can't party with the big boys, don't show up."

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the Never Cold Call Again® System and has won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast Company’s top 30 most influential people online. To learn more, and to download a free 37-page PDF preview of his Never Cold Call Again lead-generation system, visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com/

Albert Einstein's Little-Known Sales Secret

It’s no secret that many of the great business pioneers in our history had little knowledge of their core business.

Instead, they had people skills.

That is what the Master Mind principle is about. Unfortunately, that term is used and abused all over the place in incorrect ways. A true Master Mind is a group of individuals all working together, in perfect harmony, toward a common goal.

Here are some more well-known examples of Master Mind alliances, and then I’m going to shock you with one I never knew about until I read about it last night:

1. Andrew Carnegie

When Napoleon Hill first interviewed Andrew Carnegie in 1908, he was astonished to learn that Mr. Carnegie had no knowledge whatsoever about the making and marketing of steel, even though it was the steel business that made Mr. Carnegie the richest man in the world at that time.

Instead, he assembled a group of people who were experts in the making and marketing of steel, and worked to keep them working together in harmony toward Mr. Carnegie’s goals. (And they made themselves rich in the process, too.)

2. Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison was kicked out of elementary school after only three months, with a note from the teacher explaining that he had an “addled mind” and couldn’t take an education.

He chose a career path - scientific invention - that required a deep knowledge of many of the sciences, yet he knew nothing about any of them.

What did he do? He bridged that gap by surrounding himself with a staff of scientists who did have that knowledge, and could do the things he needed to have done to complete his inventions.

And now for that shocker I promised you:

3. Albert Einstein

I nearly fell out of my chair reading last night about Albert Einstein’s mathematical weakness. Though he had a brilliant and very visionary mind for physics, he was lousy at math.

What did he do? How did he come up with his Theory of Relativity - his famous E=MC2 if he was lousy at math?

Simple: He surrounded himself with mathematicians who had the ability to take his visions and his theories and translate them into provable equations.

Surprised? Don’t be. Because here’s another:

4. Frank Rumbauskas

I personally am not someone who likes to sell. In fact, it took me several years to even get comfortable with the idea of being a salesperson when I always wanted to be a business owner, which did eventually happen but only after going through years of “boot camp” in sales roles.

How did I bridge the gap and consistently have the highest numbers wherever I worked, without a love or affinity for sales?

Easy: I surrounded myself with the most successful sales pros I could find. I learned from them, took the best techniques from each one, and built them all into a system that generated qualified leads for me on autopilot, so I didn’t have to.

In other words, I stopped being a “salesman” and began being an “order taker.” Which, by the way, is a fun job!

That’s when others began asking what I was doing to be so successful without appearing to work very hard, and that's when it dawned on me that I had knowledge others would willingly pay for. At that point I wrote the first edition of my Never Cold Call Again system, produced two CDs to accompany it, along with some other materials, and, as they say, "The rest is history." It sold so well that I was able to quit my last job only a couple of months later and I even became a New York Times best-seller!

The great news is that it's 2014 - it's the Information Age - and all of the systems, strategies, and techniques I have used to become a top sales pro, and then taught to others, are available to you. From old-school offline marketing, direct mail sales letters and the like, to modern lead-generation strategies like search engine marketing, mobile marketing, social media, LinkedIn, and more, there's no excuse to not be a top sales pro - and ZERO excuse to cold call anymore!

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the Never Cold Call Again® System and has won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast Company’s top 30 most influential people online. To learn more, and to download a free 37-page PDF preview of his Never Cold Call Again lead-generation system, visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com/

What Is WRONG with Cold Callers?

Last week I decided to tweet and re-tweet two new articles, to gauge response from people other than my email subscribers.

As predicted, there were a slew of responses from people who have some kind of bizarre emotional addiction to cold calling. They were the typical responses, such as:

"Cold calling works for me!""There's still a place for cold calling in B2B sales!""If cold calling doesn't work for you, you're doing it wrong!""I make a lot of sales by cold calling!"

Hmm... really? Personally, I think these people are crazy, or delusional, or, probably most likely, just too lazy to bother to learn anything better. They're content with what they're bringing in, and so good for them.

But for people with lofty goals like you and me, that simply isn't good enough!

In a business environment where it's been proven over and over again that 80% of decision makers simply will never take a cold call - yet alone buy from one - cold calling is dead. Or as a major firm that supports financial advisors announced in a report, "Cold calling has gone the way of the Betamax and the wooly mammoth."

Why is this important?

Well, aside from the obvious fact that cold calling is a waste of time, is the fact that 20% of those people will buy from cold calls. And therein lies the problem.

As long as those 20% are still buying from cold calls, salespeople will continue to delude themselves into thinking that "cold calling works!"

Seriously - the average success rate from cold calling is 1%, and among the very best of the best, it's 3%.

Three percent! But is this any surprise when only 1 in 5 decision makers will even respond to a cold call in the first place?

If that 20% of the market would just stop responding to cold calls, people would wake up to the fact that it's a zero-results game, and they'd finally give it up and do something more productive to generate leads.

But, I'm not complaining. As long as the majority of salespeople continue to cold call and keep on fighting each other over that 20% of the market, the rest of us are free to go out and close sales with the other 80%.

I mentioned earlier that the cold calling lovers have some kind of bizarre emotional addiction to cold calling. Because they do. There's zero logic behind a decision to make cold calls when they don't work anymore. And as long as salespeople get a sale here and there from cold calling, the addiction will go on, and they'll continue to be afraid to stop cold calling and begin doing something different and better to prospect for sales.

So that's why it's time for you to...

Break Your Cold Calling Addiction!

There's really no sense in continuing to cold call when even a university study concluded that 4 out of 5 people will never respond. That's pretty bad odds. And in terms of actual sales success, it's even worse than that.

But, there's good news: There's a way out of the cold calling addiction. Lots of ways out. And no, I'm not one of an endless parade of hucksters selling "get rich with social media" products, although knowing how to use LinkedIn properly could provide you with all the business you'll ever need and then some.

If you're still cold calling, get out of your comfort zone, start learning what really works in today's modern economy, and watch your sales numbers explode.

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the Never Cold Call Again® System and has won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast Company’s top 30 most influential people online. To learn more, and to download a free 37-page PDF preview of his Never Cold Call Again lead-generation system, visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com/

How The Internet Has Killed Cold Calling

Yesterday, as I do on every Tuesday, I read Jeffrey Gitomer's excellent sales newsletter, as you should too if you want to be a superstar in sales.

One of the guest articles really made an excellent point: The topic was, you guessed it, cold calling.

The author explained that up until the early to mid 1990s, companies generally had an "open door" policy when it came to cold callers. Salespeople who made cold calls were the primary means of learning about new products and services, and in order to stay on the cutting edge, decision makers would frequently accept cold calls if only to stay educated on what was out there in the marketplace.

Then came the late 1990s, and a little something called the Internet, and all that changed.

How The Internet Killed Cold Calling

Let's be honest here - even though cold calls were far more widely accepted twenty years ago, they've always been annoying, and many busy people only did business via trusted referrals - something I do myself with all large purchases.

Having said that, though, up until the mid-1990s, cold calling had a place.

Why? I'll explain:

Pre-2000: No Internet, or weak and poorly populated Internet. No blogs or online journals, or even good search engines at the time - you had to go to a site like Yahoo and then find the seemingly well-hidden search box. Therefore, salespeople who made cold calls were a useful resource to find out what was new and cutting-edge.

Post-2000: The Internet as we know it today, and now in 2014, you can even do all of your business networking, better than you could do it offline and in person, on sites like LinkedIn. Decision makers don't turn to salespeople to learn about the latest and greatest. They rely on Google, LinkedIn, blogs, social media, and the Internet in general for that information.

Furthermore, they use the Internet to find vendors to serve their needs. In other words, the days of waiting for a salesperson to call or knock on the door are over. Now, prospects are pro-active: They don't wait for a salesperson to call. The get online and find the right salesperson.

Are they finding you? If not, why not?

Guess what - people find me. And they find my sales reps and agencies and resellers. Yes, I'm still out selling on a regular basis, in my consulting and training business. But I haven't made a cold call since about the year 2000.

It all started in 1996 when I got the dream job I'd been waiting for 2 years to get, on a waitlist. My new boss was horrified to see me cold calling - he told me that company was too reputable and too well-trusted to have salespeople ruining their image with cold calls. (Think about that - it's a lesson in itself.)

He teamed me up with the top rep in the office, who introduced me to his many networking contacts throughout the city, all of whom where also top sales pros. I spent time with them, they mentored me, and I learned how they were doing it - and what I learned what nothing of what I expected. Hint: They were NOT cold calling!

As if by a stroke of magic, I finally started making sales. Lots of sales! I soon had so many leads that I was able to pick & choose which ones I wanted, and would give the leftovers to other reps in the office and split the commissions with them.

They all wanted to know how on earth I was generating so many hot leads, and that's when it dawned on me that I had knowledge others would willingly pay for. At that point I wrote the first edition of my Never Cold Call Again system, produced two CDs to accompany it, along with some other materials, and, as they say, "The rest is history." It sold so well that I was able to quit my last job only a couple of months later and I even became a New York Times best-seller!

If you want the same level of success, do yourself a favor: Drop the cold calling charade and begin using modern, Information Age sales prospecting techniques that work. Your wallet and your bank account will thank you for it!

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the Never Cold Call Again® System and has won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast Company’s top 30 most influential people online. To learn more, and to download a free 37-page PDF preview of his Never Cold Call Again lead-generation system, visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com/

The USP - Unique Selling Proposition - in 2014

This weekend I read much of the classic marketing book Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

The book gives a history of marketing, advertising, and selling starting with the 1950s, and what they had to say was a real eye-opener:

In the 1950s, selling was all about the Unique Selling Proposition, or "USP." But toward the end of the 1950s, the USP, due to both overuse and the onslaught of technology, had become useless and ineffective.

Fast-forward about 55 years to today, and what is almost every sales book, sales manager, and sales trainer telling you to use?

A freaking USP!

I personally hate the idea of a USP. Or more specifically, using one in selling. But, like cold calling, everyone is telling you to do it, only because "that's the thing to do."

My issue with a USP is the same as with a cold calling script: It makes you come across as cold and robotic, and people don't buy from cold personalities. They buy from people who show warmth and can communicate well.

The idea of a USP forces you into crafting a "30-second commercial" or an "elevator pitch," which, for all intents and purposes, might as well be a cold calling script, because they have the effect of triggering instant sales resistance and pushing people away from you.

In the relatively few cases when I did meet someone in an elevator that led to a sale, it was by being personable - not by talking business, and not by jumping into a 30-second blurb about what I sell. That kind of nonsense will make the other person RUN as soon as the elevator door opens.

Take a look at the very top-performing salespeople in your organization, and one thing becomes clear: They're personable. They know how to talk to people, they like to talk to people, and they make their huge sales numbers through building relationships and connections, not by pummeling people with annoyoing "USP" elevator speeches.

When I relocated to Dallas I got tons of business by going to networking events. How? By announcing that I was there to make new friends with like-minded people, not by giving a 30-second speech about what I was selling.

Worst of all, guess what the USP was really designed for - not networking. It was invented to be used with cold calling. The idea is to get someone on the phone, or in front of you in person, and pitch your USP.

In other words, you're taking an obsolete and ineffective method of making the initial contact - via a USP instead of acting like a normal, personable human being - and you're delivering it via cold calling, which has the lowest percentage of all sales call success!

In other words....

Stop cold calling already!

Continuing to cold call makes zero sense, particularly even when university studies concluded that 4 out of 5 decision makers won't even take your call, let alone buy from you. Those are pretty bad odds. Combine that with triggering instant sales resistance by using a USP on the 20% you might be able to reach, and you're finished in sales.

The good news is that there's a way out of cold calling. Lots of ways - more than you can imagine. Jeffrey Gitomer and I did a brainstorm session where we ran a stopwatch for 30 seconds and tried to see how many alternatives to cold calling we could list in that time.

We came up with over two dozen!

So give up the cold calling nonsense, and learn how to use the Internet, Social Media, LinkedIn, how to network effectively (no USPs!) and the other many options out there to give up cold calling forever.

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the Never Cold Call Again® System and has won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast Company’s top 30 most influential people online. To learn more, and to download a free 37-page PDF preview of his Never Cold Call Again lead-generation system, visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com/

Sales Tip: An Easy Way to Make More Sales - Fast

I’d like to share with you a very easy trick you can use, to get more sales, fast & easy.

I learned about this several years ago when I was studying the
science of social dynamics and sub-communication in order to apply the
information to improving my sales. But it was a very unusual application
of this science – or I should say, a mis-application – that really
surprised me.

I learned of it when I met Neil Strauss, author of the book The Game,
about a bunch of self-proclaimed “pickup artists” who lived in
Hollywood and devoted their time to learning how to pick up women.
(Yeah, kinda lame, but there’s good info here so keep reading!)

The gist of what they did was this: They’d approach women in bars,
and open conversations with dumb questions about random things, always
starting with, “Hey, I need a female opinion on something.”

What this did was allow them to come in “under the radar.” As the
book explains, in a bar or nightclub situation, women automatically have
their guard up and the usual pickup lines that men use will fail, even
if the woman would otherwise be interested in the man. They call this a
“programming wall.”

But by using this strategy of asking a completely random question,
under the guise of “I need your opinion,” they’d be able to start a
conversation and move it forward to where they could successfully get a
phone number or ask her out on a date.

What intrigued me most, however, was this idea of “programming walls”
and how a woman would not talk to a desirable man, just because he
approached her in a way that hit one of these subconscious walls and
caused her to shut down.

It ingrigued me because selling works in exactly the same way.
Selling is a game of human nature, and you have to know how to make the
right approach and avoid hitting these so-called programming walls.

Cold Calling and Programming Walls

I observe myself doing it all the time. Whether I’m walking through
the mall and pass by one of those kiosks with an annoying salesperson
calling me to come over, or a sales rep approaches me in the typical
cold call manner, I completely shut down and want nothing to do with
them.

Sometimes I even do this with the friendly people offering free
samples in the supermarket – not because I don’t want the sample, but
because their method of approach triggers a programming wall in my mind, and I walk on by pretending to be uninterested.

Similarly, someone may be selling something I need, or am even
actively shopping for, but when they cold call me, the programming wall
goes up, they slam head-first into it, and nothing happens.

Years ago, long before Neil’s book came out, a sales manager who
agreed that cold calling is a waste of time explained to us that cold
calling is slamming head-first into a brick wall, when we really needed
to go around the walls.

That’s why even those who cold call will still perpuate ridiculous
stories about how someone “got in the door,” like the urban legend about
mailing someone one shoe along with a note saying, “I’ve got one foot
in the door, how about the other?”

Obviously someone who has never sold successfully made that one up,
but you get my point – getting in the door successfully means finding
ways and means of getting around the door and into the decision maker’s office.

Cold calling means slamming into that door over and over again. If
you follow the insane advice to “increase your activity,” all that means
is you’ll be slamming into it even more and more.

The answer isn’t to cold call. It’s to use effective, Information Age, self-marketing systems and methods that get you around the door. And closing sales.

- See more at: http://www.nevercoldcall.com/blog/the-fastest-way-to-easy-sales/#sthash.DAM2hzIG.dpuf

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the Never Cold Call Again® System
and has won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business
Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast
Company’s top 30 most influential people online. To learn more, and to
download a free 37-page PDF preview of his Never Cold Call Again
lead-generation system, visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com/

The Ineffectiveness of Cold Calling

Expecting the usual ranting and raving of a lunatic with an unhealthy
emotional attachment to cold calling, I opened it, began reading, and…
was pleasantly surprised!

His opinion was not only that cold calling doesn’t work, but that
anyone who is still doing it has some very dangerous learned behaviors
that must be un-learned before sales success can happen.

Never mind the studies showing that 80% of decision makers will
never, ever buy from a cold call, or that it now takes an experienced
salesperson 7.5 hours, on average, to get ONE qualified appointment.

What he explained is much worse than that. So let’s get to it:

The Insanity of Cold Calling

The explanation behind this has to do with a principle of psychology
defining the seven character defects that cause people to behave the way
they do.

These character defects are called “Learned Behavior.” The good news
is that, when addressed with Behavior Modification solutions (BMOD),
they can become “Unlearned Behavior,” but it takes longer!

Now here’s where it gets interesting: Salespeople as a whole have some HORRIBLE “Learned Behavior”!!!!

I see it all the time as I’m out with reps who have years of
experience, and over those years, have picked up terrible habits, saying
things that are totally irrelevant and have nothing to do with the
prospect’s needs – all the usual suspects such as, “We have the best
service,” “We’re the marketing leader,” blah blah blah.

But the worst learned behavior of all is COLD CALLING.

It blows my mind that SO MANY valuable, and extremely effective,
alternatives to cold calling exist today, from long established
self-marketing strategies, to the Internet, to social media, to good
old-fashioned networking and relationship building, and so many, many
more.

But due to learned behavior, otherwise intelligent and capable
salespeople get up every day and begin wasting endless hours cold
calling instead!

The bottom line is that most salespeople fail, not because they’re
bad salespeople, but because of this “Learned Behavior” that has
essentially programmed them to do things that don’t work anymore!

I Used To Be A Failure, Too

When I started out in sales, i was a miserable failure myself,
because I was told over and over again, and had it endlessly drilled
into my head, that I MUST cold call. When I objected and said it wasn’t
working, I was told to cold call even more!

THIS IS THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY!

When something isn’t working, the answer isn’t to do more of it. It’s to change your activities and your behavior to something that does work.

And guess what? Cold calling DOES NOT work, not anymore, not in today’s economy!

The solution, therefore, is to STOP cold calling and START doing something that works instead!

- See more at: http://www.nevercoldcall.com/blog/the-insanity-of-cold-calling/#sthash.a3sreyt3.dpuf

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the Never Cold Call Again® System
and has won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business
Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast
Company’s top 30 most influential people online. To learn more, and to
download a free 37-page PDF preview of his Never Cold Call Again
lead-generation system, visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com/

Still Cold Calling in 2013? Think Again!

I
received a VERY interesting email from a reader, a regional sales
manager for a large company, last week. The subject line of his email
was, “All salespeople are sick if they are still cold calling.”

Intrigued, I immediately opened it, and was pleasantly surprised at the arguments he offered!

Before I get to that, here’s a reminder of a basic principle I teach:

Cold calling, quite simply, is … DUMB!

Not only does it get appointments at a very low rate of success, but
worse yet, appointments set by cold calling are usually a waste of time,
with a low-quality prospect who probably isn’t fully qualified, and
ready, willing, and able to buy from you right now.

But I digress. Back to the point of this email…

The “Sickness” of Cold Calling

The explanation behind this has to do with a principle of psychology
defining the seven character defects that cause people to behave the way
they do.

These character defects are called “Learned Behavior.” The good news
is that, when addressed with Behavior Modification solutions (BMOD),
they can become “Unlearned Behavior,” but it takes longer!

Now here’s where it gets interesting: Salespeople as a whole have some HORRIBLE “Learned Behavior”!!!!

I see it all the time as I’m out with reps who have years of
experience, and over those years, have picked up terrible habits, saying
things that are totally irrelevant and have nothing to do with the
prospect’s needs – all the usual suspects such as, “We have the best
service,” “We’re the marketing leader,” blah blah blah.

But the worst learned behavior of all is COLD CALLING.

It blows my mind that SO MANY valuable, and extremely effective,
alternatives to cold calling exist today, from long established
self-marketing strategies, to the Internet, to social media, to good
old-fashioned networking and relationship building, and so many, many
more.

But due to learned behavior, otherwise intelligent and capable
salespeople get up every day and begin wasting endless hours cold
calling instead!

The bottom line is that most salespeople fail, not because they’re
bad salespeople, but because of this “Learned Behavior” that has
essentially programmed them to do things that don’t work anymore!

I Used To Be A Failure, Too

When I started out in sales, i was a miserable failure myself,
because I was told over and over again, and had it endlessly drilled
into my head, that I MUST cold call. When I objected and said it wasn’t
working, I was told to cold call even more!

THIS IS THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY!

When something isn’t working, the answer isn’t to do more of it. It’s to change your activities and your behavior to something that does work.

And guess what? Cold calling DOES NOT work, not anymore, not in today’s economy!

The solution, therefore, is to STOP cold calling and START doing something that works instead!

- See more at: http://www.nevercoldcall.com/blog/still-cold-calling-youre-sick/#sthash.Pj5zMmc1.dpuf

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the Never Cold Call Again® System
and has won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business
Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast
Company’s top 30 most influential people online. To learn more, and to
download a free 37-page PDF preview of his Never Cold Call Again
lead-generation system, visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com/

Why Selling Is Really Stupid

Not
too long ago, someone emailed me to let me know about a heated debate
over my book that was taking place on one of the sales discussion forums
online. Because I get such a kick out of all the old-school “You must
cold call or die!” fanatics still lingering out there, I immediately
signed on to have a look. Sure enough, salespeople who are still out
there working every day, fighting it out in the trenches to make a
living, were agreeing with me. On the other hand, some coach who charges
corporations thousands of dollars to train salespeople posted a lengthy
message about how we live and die by cold calling. There’s no other
way, this high-paid trainer said.

(Interestingly, I took a look at this person’s site. I went to the
articles archive. The very first line of the very first article said,
“Salespeople don’t succeed because they don’t make enough phone calls.”
Needless to say, I clicked my back button and got out of there! No
wonder why so many companies I work with are furious at some of these
coaches they’ve paid $5,000 or more to. Could you imagine paying someone
$5,000 to have them come in for one day of training, only to have them
stand there and say, “Make more phone calls!” We already have managers
reciting that mindless chant all day long!)

What I really noticed in all of this is the same thing I always
notice. The salespeople who are out there, making a living NOW, seem to
understand the truth about cold calling. They know the score. Then you
have a bunch of managers, trainers, and coaches who have been out of the
field, and therefore out of touch with reality, for ten years, twenty
years, or even longer, and yet they still insist that cold calling is
the only way. Period. Plain and simple. Don’t even try to argue with
them, because they’ll fly off into a rant about how anyone who
disagrees is just plain wrong, lazy, or – get this – is mentally insane.
Yes, one of these coaches’ sites I looked at is based on some quack
theory that salespeople who don’t like to cold call have a variety of
mental disorders that can be effectively cured through psychotherapy.
So, according to this person, exactly 100% of us are wacko! Sorry, but
in my opinion, this goes way beyond silly. It’s downright insulting and
offensive to those of us who have to get up every day and make a living
in sales. One must wonder if anyone who touts these quack theories has
ever sold in the first place. After all, most of my managers had never
sold and they claimed to know all they keys to success!

(Ok, just for fun, as if paying someone $5,000 to have them tell you
to make more calls wasn’t enough, imagine paying someone $5,000 to tell
you you’re crazy!)

The point I’m trying to make here is that the “cold call or die”
people are generally those who have been out of the field for an
extended period of time, or have never sold in the first place. The
people who have the “cold calling isn’t working anymore, what else can I
do” attitude are those who are out there today. These old-time coaches
apparently haven’t realized that times have changed and we live in a new
reality now. Seth Godin explained in great detail exactly how and why
Interruption Marketing is dead and has almost zero chance of working in
our new economy, and how Permission Marketing is the way to go. Guess
what, folks – cold calling is the most blatant form of Interruption
Marketing ever known to mankind!

Selling Is Selling

Another point I’d like to touch on is something I faced when I was in
sales, trying to get out of one industry that had stagnated and into
another. Every time I went and interviewed for a position in a different
industry, I got the knee-jerk “You apparently
have a proven track record, but if you haven’t sold in our industry, we can’t hire you.”

This drove me nuts because I knew that selling is selling, much like
what I explained to a reader in a previous mailbag about cross-cultural
differences. Just as people are people and human nature doesn’t change
from one nation to another, it doesn’t change from one product or
service or industry to another. I know people who have been highly
successful in a variety of totally unrelated fields, and I also know
people who have been miserable failures in a variety of fields. It
doesn’t matter. One of the mistakes I made early on in selling was to
assume that something that had been highly effective for someone in
another industry would not work for me. Not so. The only thing that
really changes from one industry to the next is product knowledge, and
that’s a whole lot easier to learn than how to sell.

I’ve previously mentioned the fact that our students are in a wide
variety of industries – it’s safe to assume all industries at this
point. I want you to realize this so you don’t go and make the same
mistake I did early on of saying, “Well, that may work for you, but it
wouldn’t work for my product.” Spend time talking to salespeople you
know who are in completely different industries. Unrelated industries.
(By the way, they make great referral partners. A lot of sales reps only
network with people in related industries. By restricting yourself like
this, you’re closing yourself off from a potentially huge number of
referrals.)

So don’t pigeonhole yourself because you think what works for someone
else won’t apply to you. Try it! The worst that can happen is nothing.
(Did you hear that? I didn’t say the worst that can happen is you fail
or you lose the sale. I said the worst that can happen is nothing. So
why be afraid of something that isn’t there?) Just watch out for that
one moron coach I mentioned, or you’re likely to be labeled as psychotic
for doing something other than cold calling.

Selling Is Stupid

Okay, before you get offended, realize that I’m in sales too! I’m not
making fun of selling. I’m saying that it’s stupid when you use my
definition of the word. For a refresher, here are my definitions of the
words “buying” and “selling:”

Buying: The act of willingly acquiring for money
something that you want or need. The buyer generally leaves the
transaction feeling happy and satisfied.

Selling: Attempting to convince another that they
want or need your product or service despite the fact that they may not.
The purchaser typically leaves the
transaction with a strong feeling of buyer’s remorse.

Think back to what you’ve been taught in training about doing an
excellent follow-up to alleviate buyer’s remorse and minimize
cancellations. Now you know why.

With that in mind, does it makes sense to sell to someone? Or does it make sense to get them to buy
from you? Think about it. Think about whether the things you’re doing
on a day-to-day basis are selling, or if they’re setting people up to
buy from you. This is very powerful when properly applied.

Speaking of definitions, when I came up with these, I looked up the
standard dictionary definitions to find out what they said. Naturally, I
also looked up the definition of cold calling, and was quite surprised
and shocked to find this:

Cold calling: The ethically questionable practice of making unsolicited calls to people one does not know in order to solicit new business.

Wow. “Ethically questionable.” That doesn’t speak very highly of cold
calling. It’s a reflection on how cold calling is perceived today. It
proves that cold calling immediately triggers a lack of trust and a
credibility issue.

Maybe some of these know-it-all dictator managers and old-school coaches and trainers should look at this.

Try something different!

Don’t keep doing something that isn’t cutting it!

Don’t put too much trust in managers and coaches who have been out of sales for decades!

And whatever you do, don’t get yourself committed to the psychopathic hospital because you don’t like cold calling!

- See more at: http://www.nevercoldcall.com/blog/selling-is-d-u-m-b/#sthash.za5CHzh5.dpuf

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the Never Cold Call Again® System
and has won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business
Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast
Company’s top 30 most influential people online. To learn more, and to
download a free 37-page PDF preview of his Never Cold Call Again
lead-generation system, visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com/

Cold Calling Is For Idiots

I
was literally laughing out loud at Jeffrey Gitomer’s excellent
newsletter . The main article was a very damning indictment of cold
calling, and more specifically, of managers who are still dumb enough to
tell their sales reps to “make more calls.”

But it was this line in particular that really brought out the laughter:

Make more cold calls? Huh? In 2013? Really?

The idea of “make more calls” is predicated on this very flawed
logic: “We don’t have enough sales coming in, since cold calling isn’t
working for our reps, so let’s do MORE AND MORE of it!”

The concept is this: Get every sales rep in the office either on the
phone, or out door-to-door, and spend the entire day making cold calls.

Umm….. DUMB.

Does “make more calls” result in lots of appointments? Sometimes. Do these appointments turn into sales? No.

Why “More Cold Calls” Doesn’t Work Anymore

It’s pretty obvious that with enough cold calls, you can definitely
set several appointments. But, appointments made from cold calls convert
into sales at an astonishingly low rate.

I can remember spending 80% of my time cold calling, back before I
knew better, while cold calling generated only 5% of my total sales.

Why is this so?

Quite simply, because busy, successful people will almost never
accept cold calls. In fact the famous University of North Carolina study
concluded that only 20% of decision makers will take a cold call.

Who does this leave?

The time-wasters, people with no authority to sign but who have
nothing better to do, or worse yet, who get a sick power trip out of
taunting salespeople. Sales author Tony Parinello calls them “Seymours”
because they always want to “see more” but they never buy!

The main problem with “make more calls” is that it focuses on a
“quantity over quality” mentality. What happens? Salespeople madly dial
the phone or rush from door-to-door, quickly setting appointments
without doing ANY qualifying at all. (Top sales pro go so far as to
quality prospects OUT, not just merely qualify them.)

The end result is a bunch of wasted time and worthless appointments
with people who are never going to buy. So you’ve not only wasted a
bunch of time cold calling, but now you get to waste time on fruitless
appointments, and probably leaving endless voicemails and emails for
these non-buyers!

And if you’re a salesperson, here’s my advice to you: STOP cold calling and START doing something that works instead!

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the Never Cold Call Again® System
and has won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business
Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast
Company’s top 30 most influential people online. To learn more, and to
download a free 37-page PDF preview of his Never Cold Call Again
lead-generation system, visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com/

A Valuable Sales Lesson - From A Cat!

You can learn a lot from a cat.

How to sell, for starters.

You see, cats and dogs are very different. We have one of each in our house, and if I want the dog to come over, it’s pretty simple – I call her over! 9 times out of 10, she jumps up and trots right on over, happy to see me!

The cat, on the other hand, is a different story. If you try to call a cat over, it will ignore you. The harder you try, the more you will be ignored.

Totally opposite of the dog.

And guess what – sales prospects aren’t dogs. They’re cats, and if you want to get them buying from you, you need to learn and understand “cat theory.”

Cat TheoryCat theory is simple: It states that it’s up to you to get the cat to come over. You’re the one taking the action. However, you must trick the cat into believing that it is the cat’s own idea to respond to you.

In other words, you’re really getting the cat to come over, because you want her to. But she believes it’s her own decision – that she’s doing it of her own accord.

Think about it. When you’re walking through a shopping mall or other market place, and salespeople at those kiosks yell to you to come over and look at whatever useless trinket they’re selling, your first reaction is to shut down and either ignore them, or give a polite “no thank you.”

By contrast, an intelligently constructed store window, containing goods you would like to have, does the polar opposite: It entices you to draw nearer, take a closer look, and possibly enter the store to buy.

You may have thought it was your own idea to go into the store, but in reality, the store’s staff made you come in. They set things up to draw you in, while letting you believe it was your own idea to do so.

And that’s how cat theory works in the real-world of selling. You must create the ideal circumstances to get prospects to come to you, ready to buy, while letting them believe they did it all on their own.

Using This In The Real WorldCat theory applies across the spectrum of sales situations, from prospecting all the way to the culmination of the sale (enticing them to buy instead of “closing” them).

It’s in prospecting, however – or more precisely, lead generation – that it’s most effective.

When you create the ideal circumstances to get qualified prospects to come to you, much like that store window, they do just that – and the balance of power is in your favor, since the prospect approached you rather than the other way around.

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the Never Cold Call Again® System and has won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast Company’s top 30 most influential people online. To learn more, and to download a free 37-page PDF preview of his Never Cold Call Again lead-generation system, visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com/

"Goes To Show That Cold Calling Does Work!"

I saw Wall Street, one of my two all-time favorite movies, this past weekend again for the first time in a long time!

Naturally, considering what I do for a living, I had to laugh when Bud Fox gets promoted to his new corner office and the sales manager says over the loudspeaker, “Goes to show that cold calling does work.”

Of
course the irony of the scene is that Bud wasn’t cold calling at all.
(What he was doing is illegal, but that’s another story altogether!)
And just before that announcement, one of the cold calling reps was
fired. Go figure.

This nonsense goes on in just about all sales
offices. Ask any sales manager what their top performers are doing and
they’ll tell you they’re cold calling.

Of course they’re not. If
they were, they wouldn’t be top performers – they’d probably be on
probation, or out of a job completely!

It happened to me all the
time when I was new to sales and trying to find my way. It goes without
saying that all sales managers – except for one – told me to cold
call, but it was even more frustrating when I’d approach top sales reps
who told me the same thing.

It drove me nuts because I’d watch them and observe them and clearly see that they were not cold calling.

Finally
I started at a new job where the sales manager had a brain, and when
he saw me start cold calling, because I didn’t know what else to do, he
pulled me aside and said, “Frank, I didn’t spend thousands to hire and
train you to have you doing the job of a minimum-wage telemarketer.”

That’s when he let me in on the dirty little secret:Cold calling is a sham and a waste of time!

He
teamed me up with the top sales rep in that office. We went to our
first appointment together where I could watch him work his magic.

On
the way over, he explained, “Calling people at random is a complete
waste of time. There is a certain percentage of the market who is
pre-disposed to buy from you. Your job is to get those people to know
about you so they call you and you become their order taker.”

That’s when the light bulb went off for me.

He
told me that 20% of the market absolutely will never buy from me, 20%
will buy if they know about me, and the other 60% are up in the air and
need to be “sold.”

The failure of most salespeople comes about
because they waste their time calling on the 20% who will say ‘no’ and
the 60% who will say ‘maybe’ instead of spending all of their time in
front of that 20% who will definitely say ‘yes’ and BUY.

By the
way, that 60% ‘maybe’ crowd is the worst of all because most of them
will string you along and waste your time without buying! At least the
‘no’ people will say no and not waste your time. (I bring this up
because most sales
managers will instruct salespeople to go after that 60%, which makes
no sense to me. Under my sales philosophy, you work with them only
after they move into the 20% ‘yes’ crowd.)

In any case, that day was a HUGE eye-opener for me.

From that point forward I only spent my time with top sales pros. I asked lots of questions, observed, took them to lunch, whatever I needed to do to gain their knowledge.

Over
time I learned all of their lead-generation tactics, worked them into a
system, and began using that system to the point where I had more
leads than I could handle, and since most of those leads were in the
20%, pre-disposed ‘yes’ crowd, my closing rate was an astonishing 80%,
compared with the 20% average in my company!

Eventually others wanted to learn from me, and that’s how my Never Cold Call Again
system came about. It’s the complete storehouse of all that knowledge
and ’inside information’ that I used to become a top success in sales,
and that thousands of others have used to do the same.

New York Times best-selling author Frank Rumbauskas is the author of the Never Cold Call Again® System
and has won numerous accolades, such as Readers Choice for Business
Book of the Year from 800-CEO-READ, and has been named one of Fast
Company’s top 30 most influential people online. To learn more, and to
download a free 37-page PDF preview of his Never Cold Call Again
lead-generation system, visit http://www.nevercoldcall.com/

New Webinar: Advanced Sales Closing & Profit Justification Techniques

I’m proud to announce that I’ll be conducting my next live webinar on Thursday, September 26th, at 11:00 AM Eastern time, and again at 3:00 PM Eastern time, on Advanced Sales Closing and Profit Justification Strategies.

This will be a LIVE webinar and nothing will be sold. You get TWO HOURS of content that’s JAM-PACKED with powerful techniques you can begin using, immediately, to begin closing more sales – today – using the very same strategies and techniques I used to achieve an astounding 80% close rate in sales.

What You’ll Learn:

- How to achieve an 80% close rate- How to do proper fact-find to develop a bulletproof proposal- Step-by-step processes to get prospects to BUY with no hard selling- How to use Profit Justification to show prospects how your solution putsmoney into their pocket- Why prospects can’t say “no” to a Profit Justified proposal, and how todo it correctly- Presentation strategies to make you stand out from the crowd- … and much more!

Learn how on this webinar! Following my webinar presentation, I’ll open it up for live Q&A, so don’t miss out.

“I attended Frank’s “Get Hot Leads with LinkedIn” webinar and it was EXTREMELY informative and useful. He was very specific on the steps needed to create and maintain a highly effective LinkedIn networking campaign. I can’t wait to get my LinkedIn functionality up and running. I haven’t been so excited about a marketing solution in a long time!” -Rick Mickunas, Aegis Data

“The $20.00 I spent yesterday on the LinkedIn presentation was worth every penny. I took action yesterday, and I thank you for it. It’s my sincere hope we can connect via LinkedIn.” -John J. Polidori II, MBA

“Frank, I just attended your webinar and found the content very valuable.” -Pablo Pittaluga, VP of Sales, IT ROI Solutions

“I also attended that webinar and found it very helpful. and motivating. I recommend Frank and his books highly.” -Edward Reeve, First Financial

“I would like to say how I enjoyed the webinar which took place on the 3rd October, it highlighted some key points and useful tips.” -Devyesh Patel-> Register Here: